Uruguay: South America’s Latest Hot Spot

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The outgoing tide deposited emerald-green kelp on Playa Mansa.
Alejandro Turell dodged around the jetsam piled on the sand but
then halted, tipping his head to one side as a sandpiper chirped
in the dunes. Sunbathers, intent on their beach novels and bikini
straps, ignored the young naturalist illustrator as he used his
sandal to nudge a cluster of crab eggs still damp from the sea.
“These puff up like little balls when they dry in the sun,” he
said. As we continued to parallel the surf outside the fishing
village of José
Ignacio, Turell told me that when Charles Darwin explored
Uruguay
in 1833 during the second voyage of the H.M.S.
Beagle, he discovered the fossil of a giant ground
sloth. Then he remarked that the country’s quirks weren’t
limited to its flora and fauna. “We are the Galápagos of South
American culture,” Turell said.

La República Oriental del Uruguay is an accident of geography and
jealousy. Had Lord John Ponsonby been a less handsome man, his
diplomatic posting to South America in the 1820’s might not have
been necessary to remove him from the immediate vicinity of
George IV’s favorite mistress, who apparently had a certain
fondness for the dashing emissary. As fate would have it, this
amorous exile meant that Ponsonby wound up in the right place to
mediate for the creation of a buffer state between two squabbling
titans, Argentina and Brazil, who have used this postage-stamp
republic as their personal playground ever since.

In recent years Uruguay has joined the jet-set party circuit,
with high-rise Punta del Este standing in as a Southern
Hemisphere clone of Miami Beach. Red-hot Brazilian hotel group
Fasano recently debuted Las Piedras Fasano, its first countryside
property, here. The low-slung cottages of neighboring José
Ignacio, on the other hand, evoke the colloquial sensibility of
Amagansett, on Long Island’s South Fork. (Both are less than a
hundred miles up the coast from the capital of Montevideo and a
45-minute flight from Buenos Aires.) Fishermen still launch their
boats from Playa Mansa, but now they share the beach with a
seasonal population of international visitors—including British
novelist Martin Amis, Argentine polo champion Nacho Figueras, and
Latin pop star Shakira—who congregate at Parador La Huella
restaurant to drink vodka caipiroskas as flamenco singer Diego el
Cigala wails “Lágrimas Negras” on the speakers.

And yet, as Turell hinted, there is more to the Uruguayan way of
life that sets it apart from its more flamboyant neighbors. For
all the sunny outlook at the shore, a melancholy undercurrent
runs through the culture—even though the country has had only one
dictator of any note, little abject poverty or crime, and no
civil conflicts in recent history except those that take place on
the soccer field. Still, the music seems moodier than brassy
Brazilian samba or Argentinean ritmo latino pop; while
tracing a roundabout route through the adjoining coastal states
of Maldonado and Rocha, I kept hearing “La Cumparsita,” one of
the all-time greatest tangos, composed by Montevideo native
Gerardo Hernán Matos Rodríguez and sometimes known by a version
of its opening lyric, “Little Parade of Endless Miseries.” The
art scene is surprisingly dominant, producing works that call to
mind an abstracted form of nature. The cuisine is pared down to
the most primal elements; the country’s most famous chef has the
soul of a poet and the curiosity of a wilderness scout. Nothing
is what it first seems in this accidental republic.

One of the principal reasons Uruguay has begun to register on the
global radar has to do with the opening of Playa Vik, the
19-suite beach compound in José Ignacio owned by art collectors
Alex and Carrie Vik. Designed by Uruguayan architect Carlos Ott,
the complex is an aggressive visual statement. The seaside
retreat also serves as a contemporary counterpoint for its
12-suite sister property, Estancia Vik, a working cattle ranch
five miles inland. “Playa is about bringing Uruguay into the
twenty-first century, while Estancia is an homage to traditional
culture and nature,” explained Vik, a Norwegian entrepreneur
whose extended family has Uruguayan roots. “It’s a way to
showcase the two facets of Uruguay within a short distance of
each other.”

At the heart of Playa Vik is a titanium-and-glass-clad building
dubbed Sculpture—all rigid, angular surfaces, with a cantilevered
pool deck facing the steely towers of Punta to the west. In the
upper atrium hangs a soft-gray-and-rose installation by Anselm
Kiefer titled The Secret Life of Plants. Staying here is
like a sleepover in a private gallery where you get to lounge on
the artwork, even shower with it (Uruguayan painter Marcelo
Legrand splashed a graphic fresco across the bathroom of the
Valentina Suite). When the Viks planned their properties, they
intentionally sought to promote the works of South American
artists. Perhaps the best known of their collaborators, Uruguayan
sculptor Pablo Atchugarry, forged the hotel’s oxidized-bronze
door—a massive portal that would thwart philistines storming a
museum.

Introductions are easy in this unceremonious backwater, and so a
few days later Atchugarry himself invited me to his studio
outside José Ignacio. A burly man with marble dust caked on his
broad face and graying beard, he has participated in the Venice
Biennale and exhibited in galleries from São Paulo to Seoul. His
monumental pillars bring to mind the bleached strata that are
often exposed in abandoned quarries. Atchugarry explained that he
and the marble typically have a “communication” before the
carving commences; rather than execute sketches, he draws
directly on the rough surface. We stood talking next to a jumble
of columns shipped over from the Italian town of Carrara. “Since
I am chained to the marble,” he said with a grin, “it is better
to be here at home than in Italy.”

Like Turell, Atchugarry idealizes a connection between art and
nature, but in his case, he has shaped the landscape to his own
liking, dredging a man-made lake into the hills beyond his studio
as a focal point for a sculpture park and outdoor concert venue.
His colossal works, apparently, require equal patience on the
part of patrons like the Viks. The unfinished pieces he leaned
against had been sitting around for several years—waiting, as he
explained, for the conversation to start up again. Asked when
they might be finished, he shrugged, smiling sweetly. His sense
of time seemed to keep pace with geology. I had been advised that
Uruguayans were laid-back, but this was positively horizontal.

It was tempting to head right back from Atchugarry’s studio to
the cheerful bars and cabanas on Playa Mansa. But I wanted to
venture farther into the wilder campo, along dirt roads with
barbed-wire-fenced cow pastures and battered Ford pickups kicking
up clouds of pink dust. The terrain changed to low hills between
cultivated fields of corn. It took less than an hour’s drive
north to arrive in the sleepy colonial pueblo of Garzón—one
church, empty streets, a scrubby plaza with a fountain. Not
exactly the sort of place I expected to find the maestro of South
American barbecue.

“Happiness and sadness sleep in the same bed,” francis Mallmann
said. Sitting under a ripened grape arbor humming with bees at
his intimate restaurant-with-rooms, El Garzón, the
internationally renowned chef and I were discussing the
melancholy leitmotif we both found appealing about his adopted
home. Mallmann—born in Argentina of an Uruguayan mother—is as
influential as the Viks when it comes to putting this corner of
Uruguay on the map. His restaurant Los Negros, which he opened in
1993 by the lighthouse in José Ignacio, helped make a name for
the town; he closed it in 2006 and retreated from the coast to
settle deeper in the countryside. El Garzón, housed in an old
brick single-level hacienda, sits on a corner of the town plaza.
The indoor-outdoor restaurant feels less like a temple of refined
cuisine than the study of a gentleman explorer with a passion for
botany and architecture.

But the bookshelves in the lobby were conspicuously empty.
“People kept taking them,” Mallmann told me, leaving the arbor to
fetch a volume by Canadian poet Robert W. Service from his
collection. We shared a hard-rind local cheese and crusty bread
hot from an adobe oven while talking about camping in the
Maldonado pampas and cooking poetically simple meals—just a
single roasted onion; some rice in a pot. This from the man
famous for authoring Seven Fires, his extravagant
interpretation of asado barbecue that typically includes black
pudding, chorizo sausages, lamb, goat, sweetbreads, chicken, and
a suckling pig or two, all grilled over a smoky heap of wood
charcoal. Charring a whole cow, or a single vegetable, is as
elemental as taste gets.

With teams using more than 100 unique apparatuses to launch globular projectiles a half-mile or more, the 27th annual World Championship Punkin Chunkin event is our pick as November’s Weird Festival of the Month.

Later that night, under an iron chandelier that illuminated the
dining room, I ate slices of rare beef with garlicky
chimichurri and considered the poet Mallmann favored
most. The Bard of the Yukon seemed oddly lowbrow, not to mention
contextually far from home; and yet Service’s “Call of the Wild”
perfectly explained how an intellectual who trained with the
likes of Roger Vergé and Alain Senderens could wind up content in
a dusty cattle town.

Garzón and its environs are, of course, the natural home of the
gauchos. The old-fashioned ones wear flared bombachas de
campo riding pants and felt berets, a wicked dagger stuck in
embroidered waistbands. Their trusted sidekick, the criollo, is a
feral descendant of the horses brought to the New World by
Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century—an incredibly
responsive, intelligent creature with the brawny lines of a
long-distance galloper. Passing through the front gates of
Estancia Vik, about 20 miles from Garzón, I unpacked my cowboy
boots and saddled up.

“We kiss the horse to make him go and shush him to stop,”
Augustín Leone said, demonstrating by puckering up and making a
smooching sound. A slim Argentine who manages the ranch, he sat a
horse as if glued to its back at birth. When we forded a stream,
the ash from his cigarette barely quivered. My mount was so
sensitive to commands that he danced every time I raised my voice
slightly.

Since breaking my wrist riding in the highlands of Iceland a few
years ago, I sit a horse nervously now, so we trotted slowly
through the level campo. (Estancia Vik encompasses 4,000 acres on
both sides of an estuary that empties into the José Ignacio
Lagoon.) Two black bulls wrestled lazily, their horns briefly
entangled. The grass smelled like honey. Leone and I brushed past
a thorny coronilla plant where a tiny moss nest resembling a
teardrop was suspended from one limb. Before construction was
finished on the Spanish-colonial-style estancia, Alejandro Turell
would camp on the property to sketch nests like this one. The
resulting series of miniature etchings wound up framed in the
suite that was named after him.

The estate’s main structure is far more traditional than Playa
Vik—red tiled roof, white stucco exterior. There is no barrier
between the ranch buildings and the grasslands. The living room
at the center of the hacienda is dominated by a ceiling mural by
Uruguayan painter Clever Lara, who used Google Earth as his
inspiration for a bird’s-eye view of the landscape, spanning the
blue coast east of the Río de la Plata and the reddish-brown
sierras of the western interior. Craning my neck, I realized yet
another microclimate seemed to exist between the two.

It was this geographical irregularity that I set out to chart for
myself the next day. About an hour northeast, near the town of
Castillos, the rocky plains gave way to an intriguing tableau of
wetlands and palm trees as I turned in to the long driveway at
Estancia Guardia del Monte, a hillside building facing a vast
freshwater lagoon. A pan of Chinche-grape jelly bubbled on a
wood-burning stove in the kitchen, where I found the present
owner, Alicia Fernández de Servetto. She offered to show me one
of Uruguay’s strangest natural treasures. Gauchos used to love
this indigenous tree for its sheltering canopy, she explained as
we walked down a path leading to an old-growth forest of
50-foot-tall evergreens resembling African baobabs.

The giant ombu is, in its own way, as much of an aesthetic
achievement as one of Atchugarry’s sculptures or Kiefer’s murals
at Playa Vik. The silvery bark was splintered and pitted with
wormholes, splashes of pink and blue lichen, clumps of green
mold, tendrils escaping from gnarled roots. My palm rested on a
crack where a few scraps of leaves were caught. While I knew
better than to touch a million-dollar painting, no one objected
to my probing the secret life of this one rare plant. It was hard
to believe that its nearest North American cousin was plain old
pokeweed.

“Vamos a la playa, oh oh,” sang the happy boy at the
table next to mine in Restorán Lajau, where I waited for an order
of crisp crab croquettes with caramelized-onion marmalade. In a
red adobe-and-brick house facing the Atlantic at La Pedrera, Raúl
Sanson Collazo cooked simple seafood dishes and crafted condiment
boxes out of driftwood. A slight backtrack from Castillos off the
main highway, this beach town and the nearby un-signposted
settlement of Oceanía del Polonio may be the next José Ignacio.
Already town houses along the shoreline rambla between Playa del
Barco and El Penon looked freshly spruced; surfers and
kiteboarders who risk the undertow that whips through many of the
bays along Uruguay’s coast make this one of their first dips on
the way to funkier Punta del Diablo, farther north.

So how could I resist one last chance to see the playa,
too? By the time I finished lunch, the beach at La Pedrera was
nearly empty and the sky turning squall-gray. The sand was
littered with those strange crab eggs Alejandro Turell admired,
now wonderfully altered from their jellied liquid state to
parchment orbs that glowed like distant moons. For the solitary
child splashing in the water, however, the eggs were simply beach
toys. He tossed handfuls into the relentless sea-foam, where they
were pulled under and miraculously popped back up, until at last
they disappeared in a bigger wave, an endless flotilla of little
mysteries.